


How the Light Gets In

by enigma731



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fear, Flash Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 20:35:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4680461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enigma731/pseuds/enigma731
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That’s the problem with people, Clint decides. Just when you’re starting to get attached, they turn out to be disappointments.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How the Light Gets In

**Author's Note:**

> This is a flash fic written basically as an all-nighter. So um. That's really all I have to say for myself.

Everything is wrong, from the beginning.

It’s _supposed_ to be a low risk operation, an opportunity for Natasha to prove herself more than anything else. She’s had field clearance for just over a month now, has performed admirably on the handful of routine ops Clint’s supervised so far.

Today they’re in Vladivostok, at a bunker that once belonged to Red Room, according to S.H.I.E.L.D.’s intel. It’s been abandoned for nearly a decade, though, now nothing more than the crumbling shell of a facility on the outskirts of the city. Still, it’s a lead, a potential source of valuable data, and the first real step in the deal Natasha’s made with her new employers--her assistance in bringing down the program in exchange for amnesty.

The afternoon is grey and overcast, and there’s a bite to the air that seems to cut right to the skin as they make their way to the entrance. Clint tries to pass his unease off on the weather, tell himself it’s just the cold creeping its way down the back of his neck.

Natasha says nothing as they face the door, but that’s nothing new. She’s quiet in general, and quieter still in the field. There’s no visible lock or handle on the door, and Clint starts to reach for his bow, thinking that they’ll need a small explosion, or at least an acid arrow fired into a strategic spot.

“Don’t,” Natasha interrupts, surprising him. She hasn’t even turned back to look at him, and if everything else here wasn’t already setting him on edge, that alone would definitely do the trick.

Stepping forward, she feels along the wall, and a moment later, a portion of the concrete exterior melts away to reveal a tiny touchscreen. Her fingers fly over it, far too fast for Clint to follow, and then there’s a shift in the building, the sound of stone on stone as the door slides open.

“Let’s go,” Natasha tells him, starting forward without waiting for his response.

Clint sighs, following as directed, but making a mental note to discuss communication in the field once they’re back at HQ. If he brings it up in front of Fury at the debrief, maybe he’ll even get somewhere with her. Natasha hasn’t been outright uncooperative since he brought her in, hasn’t shown any signs of intentionally defying or undermining his guidance or anyone else’s. It’s just that it’s painfully clear she has no idea how to play with others, how to work with a partner, let alone a team. And she doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned with learning any of those things, either.

Inside, the bunker is dark, save for the dim light pouring in from the doorway. It smells like rusting metal, and the residual stink of organic things that rotted away years ago. His eyes have just begun adjusting to the gloom when the building seems to shudder again, the heavy door sliding abruptly shut with a _boom_ that vibrates up from the floor.

What happens next comes all in a rush, too fast for him to process. There’s a hiss from the corners of the room that Clint vaguely recognizes as the sound of pressurized gas being released, the faint taste of something metallic on the inside of his nose, the back of his tongue, and the sound of Natasha cursing in Russian from somewhere in the now-complete darkness.

The effect is instantaneous: fear spikes through him like a fist closing around his heart, his throat, and Clint claws instinctively at his chest as he begins to choke. Every nerve ending in his body is singing with shrill panic, every cell screaming with adrenaline. He can’t see anything in the dark, so he slams his eyes shut, tries to focus on his other senses because something horrible is coming. He knows it with every fiber of his being, knows he’s helpless to do anything about it. His skills are only as good as his sight, and right now that’s completely gone.

The first shot explodes into the darkness, hitting something to the right of Clint’s shoulder. There’s the sound of heavy objects crumbling, falling, and he barely manages to move away as a piece of the ceiling comes down around him. Clint stumbles blindly backward as the second shot makes his ears ring. The third catches him in the side, searing pain that makes him cry out despite himself.

He goes still then, presses the heel of his hand to the wound, feels the sticky warmth of his own blood soaking the ruined fabric of his shirt. The unseen assailant is on him in the next instant, a flurry of vicious punches and kicks, and suddenly his mind is falling backward in time as he fights back reflexively, the faces of his father, of Barney, with him in the dark, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been so afraid. The truth comes to him in a moment of horrifying clarity--that _this_ has been Natasha’s plan all along, that _she’s_ the only one with him in the dark, that _she’s_ the latest in the long line of people trying to kill him.

With the last bit of coherent thought he can muster, Clint grabs one of the stun arrows out of his quiver, stabs it blindly into the first bit of her that he can reach, barely registering the dull thud of a body hitting the ground. In the next breath, he finds an explosive arrow, breaks the head off and hurls it in the direction of what he thinks is the door. There’s a shower of rubble as the blast rips through the small space, and then sunlight pouring in. Clint doesn’t think, doesn’t look back, just lets the never-ending wave of primal fear carry him out into the world as fast as he can manage to run.

* * *

He wakes in Medical to the familiar sight of Fury standing at the foot of his bed, looking displeased. He feels as though he’s been hit by a truck, a thousand little hurts singing out from various parts of his body as he tries to move, tries to swallow down the sensation of sour cotton in his mouth.

“You remember how you got here?” asks Fury.

Clint shakes his head, wondering how much time he’s managed to lose now. Then the memory slams back into him--not of getting here, but of the darkness in the bunker, of the bullet from Natasha’s gun biting into his side, of the way she’d thrown herself at him savagely, like an animal. The fear is gone now, leaving in its wake a kind of aching sadness that has nothing to do with his injuries, but somehow manages to hurt worse.

“Extraction team found you unconscious and in shock nearly a mile from your target,” says Fury. “Picked up Romanoff inside the bunker, which was about five minutes away from total collapse. Medical found traces of a synthetic nerve agent in both of your blood samples. Looks like some kind of fear-inducing drug, probably used by Red Room during interrogations.”

“Great,” Clint manages, coughing for a moment before he manages to swallow again. At least that explains the panic, he thinks. Maybe he isn’t entirely losing it, then.

“You want to tell me how you got shot?” asks Fury, giving him a look Clint thinks would be fitting of the sort of parents he never had.

He pauses for a moment, tries to come up with a response. He’d been sure, in the darkness and the fog of the panic, that this was a trap, that Natasha had planned to kill him. It would be simple to turn her over now, to break this tenuous _thing_ he’s been building with her. No one would doubt him if he were to call her a traitor here and now. And yet he can’t find the words, for the second time can’t bring himself to take the kill shot.

“We were attacked,” he says finally. “It was dark, I didn’t see. Must have known we were coming.”

Fury eyes him for a moment longer. “That all?”

Clint nods, biting back a frustrated curse at himself. Stubborn hope, he thinks. Which will probably get him _actually_ killed one of these days.

* * *

When Clint stops by on his way out of Medical, Natasha is curled into a ball on her cot, shivering despite the fact that she’s engulfed in blankets. She doesn’t look up at him, though he can tell by the pained shallowness of her breathing that she isn’t asleep.

He glances around, makes sure there isn’t anyone in earshot before moving to sit in the chair near the head of the bed. “Hi.”

Natasha opens her eyes, but doesn’t make any other move or effort to greet him.

“Fury tell you what happened?” he asks, suddenly needing to see her reaction, as if that’s the missing piece that might make sense of everything.

She shakes her head, shifts under the blankets. There’s a thick bandage across one shoulder, Clint sees--probably where the sharp tip of the stun arrow broke her skin--and bruising along the edge of her jaw, probably from the explosion. She’s lucky to be alive, he realizes now, given that he could just as well have buried them both beneath a collapsed building.

“We got dosed,” says Clint, though he has a feeling that she already knows, is familiar with that kind of thing. “Fear serum.”

Natasha still doesn’t respond to that, doesn’t appear fazed in the slightest.

“You shot me,” Clint hisses, mostly to try and get something, _anything_ out of her.

She exhales a small puff of breath. “I know. Missed the kill shot, though.”

That ought to be it, says the rational part of his mind. That ought to be all the answer he needs to go to Fury, to finish the job he was assigned months ago. It would be easy now, with her incapacitated and apparently reluctant to fight. But that’s exactly why he can’t, he thinks. That’s why he doesn’t believe her vitriol, is less convinced than ever that she intended to take his life.

* * *

Natasha avoids him, after that.

She’s refused to explain the incident any more fully than Clint has, so she’s back on probation, field clearance revoked, monitoring bracelet slapped back on. He’s out of the field too, at least until the gunshot wound to his left side heals.

He spends his recovery time re-fletching all the used arrows he’s been collecting, ignoring the paperwork that’s stacking up on his desk, and trying to come up with alternate explanations for the sense of gnawing loss just behind his ribcage. He’s never needed a partner, never _wanted_ one before, and yet here he is, practically wallowing.

That’s the problem with people, he decides. Just when you’re starting to get attached, they turn out to be disappointments.

* * *

Clint can sense her gaze on his back, when she chooses to appear again. He’s in HQ’s pitiful excuse for a coffee shop, stirring sugar into his cup, and he _knows_ it’s her, that she’ll be standing in the doorway when he looks up again.

He moves slowly, like he’s somehow trying to avoid startling her. By the time he’s managed to turn, she’s already retreating into the crowd in the hallway.

But it isn’t an accident, he’s sure of it.

* * *

Two weeks later, she’s sitting alone in the cafeteria, twirling spaghetti precisely onto a fork.

Clint hesitates for a moment before crossing the room and dropping into the seat across from her like he doesn’t have a care in the world.

Natasha doesn’t jump, doesn’t stop what she’s doing, the plastic cutlery somehow managing to look deadly in her long fingers. She looks up at him after a few breaths, raises an eyebrow. “Did you have something to say?”

He swallows, tries to find the words to express everything he’s been feeling, to ask her to prove his doubts wrong.

She smiles at his silence, not nicely. “I thought I had made myself clear.”

* * *

Coming home four days after that, Clint freezes from halfway up the hall. The door to his apartment is ajar, which is definitely not the way he left it on the way out for work in the morning. It’s intended to make a statement, he knows, and it’s definitely got all his mental alarms going.

He doesn’t have his bow with him tonight, doesn’t even have a gun. He probably ought to back off and call S.H.I.E.L.D., or at the very least call the police. But he’s been on edge for weeks now, has been going slowly stir crazy.

To hell with it, he decides, and kicks the door the rest of the way open on his way in. There’s a gun stowed under the breakfast bar and Clint grabs for it before registering anything else.

Natasha is sitting at his kitchen table in the dark, he sees a moment later, and that probably ought to surprise him at least a little bit more than it actually does. Then again, she left him a giant clue with the open door.

“What do you want?” asks Clint, all of the uncertainty and disappointment finally boiling over into anger. "You want me to tell Fury that I changed my mind, that he should kill you? Fine, we’ll call him right now.”

She doesn’t say anything to that, stays silent as ever, and that’s more infuriating than anything else.

Clint moves on pure instinct, crossing the distance between them and dropping the gun onto the surface of the table in front of her. “You want to kill _me_ , then? Hurry up and do it.”

Natasha goes perfectly still for a moment, all of her concentration fixated on the gun, like it might be a magnet. Then she’s a flurry of motion, all at once, picking up the gun and pulling out the clip, hurling it across the room so that it lands on the floor with a clatter.

Clint flinches, frayed nerves betraying him, then takes a deep breath and sinks into the chair across from her. “Okay. So. Now that we’ve established neither of us is dying tonight. Talk.”

She swallows visibly, a muscle in her jaw jumping. “When I was a little girl in the Red Room, there was a woman who lived in town, near the shops where they would send us to get supplies. That was part of our training, part of a test. Go into town, maintain a cover, come back with what we needed and nothing more.” She pauses, takes a breath. “This woman--She lived in an apartment over a bakery, and she would be outside in the street in the mornings, feeding the birds and the stray dogs. One day she pulled me aside. Asked if I needed help.”

“And?” Clint asks when she pauses. There’s a new sort of dread growing in the back of his mind, not for his own safety, but for what he’s about to hear.

“I told her no,” says Natasha. “But she kept asking, every week. And every week--things were getting harder for me. I wanted a break. So one day I said yes. That I needed help. She took me into her home. Let me stay with her. Gave me everything I had wanted, for two days.”

“And then your handlers found out?” Clint guesses, watching her face.

“No,” she says, so quietly it’s barely audible. “No, they didn’t have to find out, because she was one of them. Always had been.”

“Shit,” Clint breathes, a visceral sort of horror blooming in the pit of his stomach, though he thinks he ought not to be surprised. He’s read plenty of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s files on the program.

“I was lucky they let me live,” she says flatly. “There were other tests, too. Later. Things would go well, I’d be offered--things. Comforts. Affection. All of them were tests. I never failed again, after that first time.”

“So--” Clint pauses, the pieces beginning to come together. “So--now you’re wondering if I’m the latest test?”

“I hadn’t thought of it before,” she admits. “Not before Vladivostok. Before they got back into my head.”

“Natasha,” he says carefully, meeting her eyes, hoping she can see the honesty in them. “Everyone who has ever gotten close to killing me was someone that I trusted. Someone I considered family, or a friend.”

She sucks in a breath, brow furrowed. “And now _you’re_ wondering if I’m the latest one of those?”

Clint nods, though in truth there isn’t much of him left that even suspects it. The fear, the possibility, the _inevitability_ of it was bad enough.

“So,” she says softly, “where does that leave us?”

“Prove me wrong,” says Clint. “And I’ll do the same.”

In the darkness of his apartment, she reaches out, takes his hand and turns it palm-up on the surface of the table. Her fingers ghost feather-light across the place in his wrist where his pulse is pounding. Slowly, she smiles.


End file.
